Ripples from La Prairie Voyageur Canoes: Chapter Seven: Snake Country and “Old Rivet”, (1822

The merger of 1821 did not bring peace to the fur country. It only changed the name on the ledger books. The new Hudson’s Bay Company inherited the North West Company’s posts, its debts, its rivalries, and its restless population of freemen. It also inherited a strategic problem: American trappers were beginning to push hard into the rich Snake Country of present-day southern Idaho, western Wyoming, and northern Utah. Governor George Simpson and Chief Factor John McLoughlin decided on a ruthless solution. They would send large brigades into the Snake Country and trap it bare—scorched-earth policy in fur. If the streams were emptied of beaver, the Americans would find no profit and perhaps stay away.

François Rivet, now nearly seventy, became part of that design.

In 1824 he joined the Snake Country brigade led by Alexander Ross. The party was enormous by mountain standards: some 140 men, women, and children when the families were counted, a moving village of trappers, freemen, engagés, and their Indian and mixed-blood households. Ross’s journal gives one of the clearest surviving snapshots of Rivet in these years. He is listed as an interpreter. Against his name the clerk noted the property he brought into the brigade: two guns, six traps, fifteen horses, and one lodge. That short inventory speaks volumes. Rivet was not a company servant working for wage alone. He was a freeman of substance, a man with his own equipment, his own horses, and the ability to support a household on the trail.

The brigade moved south and east from the Columbia posts into the valleys of the Snake, the Boise, the Bear, and the upper tributaries that drained toward the Yellowstone. The work was relentless. Traps were set and lifted in freezing water. Beaver were skinned and the pelts stretched and dried. Horses had to be guarded against theft by Blackfeet, Bannocks, or opportunistic American parties. Relations with the local tribes shifted between wary trade and open hostility. Through it all Rivet served as interpreter—bridging language and custom, smoothing the daily friction that could turn a minor misunderstanding into bloodshed.

In December 1824 the command changed. Alexander Ross, worn by the responsibility and eager to return east, handed the brigade over to Peter Skene Ogden. Ogden was already family of a sort: husband to Julia, Rivet’s stepdaughter, and father of Rivet’s step-grandson Charles. The personal connection did not make the work gentler. Ogden was a hard driver, ambitious, short-tempered, and determined to execute Simpson’s policy of exhaustion. Under his leadership the brigade became an instrument of deliberate over-trapping. The goal was not sustainable harvest. The goal was emptiness.

Rivet went with Ogden. The decision was not simple. Therese, after the first long campaign, chose to remain behind with her Salish kin rather than follow the brigade into another season of dust, danger, and scarce game. Some of the younger members of the extended household—Julia among them at times, and later the growing sons—moved in and out of the expeditions. The lodge that had once been the stable center of Rivet’s life was now often divided by the demands of the trade.

The years that followed blurred into a cycle of departure and return. The brigade would leave the Columbia posts in the autumn or late summer, winter in the Snake Country or on its edges, and come back the following year with packs of furs and the usual toll of exhausted horses, injured men, and occasional dead. Rivet’s role remained that of interpreter and experienced hand. At an age when most men had already taken their last portage, he continued to ride out. The younger trappers began to call him Old Rivet—sometimes with respect, sometimes with the half-mocking affection reserved for survivors who refused to quit.

The country itself was changing under the pressure. Streams that had been rich when Ross first led the brigade grew poorer. American parties from the Rockies and the Missouri appeared more frequently, leading to tense confrontations, shouting matches, and the occasional exchange of gunfire or desertion of men seeking better prices. Rivet, tied by kinship to Ogden yet formed in the older freeman tradition, watched the collision of systems with the cool eye of a man who had already lived through several empires.

By the late 1820s the great Snake Country campaigns had begun to wind down. The beaver were diminished. The cost in horses, goods, and men was high. Rivet himself was approaching seventy-five. In 1829 the company transferred him north and west to Fort Colvile, the post established at Kettle Falls on the upper Columbia. The years of long brigade travel were ending. A different kind of service was about to begin.

He left the Snake Country as he had entered most chapters of his life—quietly, with his gear in order, and with fewer illusions than when he had first crossed the mountains two decades earlier. The Missouri had shaped him. The Bitterroot had nearly killed him. The Salish country had given him a family. The Snake Country had shown him the fur trade at its most industrial and most ruthless. Now the river that drained to the Pacific would claim the next season of his long life.

Old Rivet turned his horses toward Fort Colvile and rode on.

NEXT

Chapter Eight: Master of Fort Colvile, (1829–1837)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-eight-master-of-fort-colvile.html

Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/rivet-of-rivers-extraordinary-life-of.html

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-three-engage-of-corps.html

Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805–1808)